About teaching and training Eskrima and Bagua. Recommended seminars, and related material I find interesting.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Outside

One of the hazards of practicing so called 'Internal Martial Arts, or concentrating purely on Nei Gung (Chi Gung), is the tendency to start focusing inwards all the time.
It's all well and good learning how to feel what's going on inside your body, and working out how to control it, but in the end, if it never manifests outside, you are just masturbating.
I have heard the Taoist view that the physical body is a gateway to understanding the 'higher' levels of human consciousness, pain and cold for instance are very immediate and real things to experience, and as such the physical world is the arena you practice in first - harder to delude yourself when there's real stuff to deal with.
But here's the thing, it's absolutely possible to be totally in your physical body, incredibly in tune with it, yet completely disconnected to the moment you are living in, what is going on around you, or have an ability to move with that moment.
Higher meditation practices often imagine a connection to the edges of the universe, or to infinity, but trust me, you'll certainly be deluded about that if you can't even connect to where you are right now, what you touch, the ground you stand on, or the space you move in.
Everything you do connects. You are a part of it all, not separate.

Yeah it's funny how folks can become so self conscious that they forget about their environment and the 'input' that is coming at them.It's very noticeable watching from the outside, and even flowing, I've had students absolutely ignore that they are taking hits because they are so focused on themselves.I think in solo practice - forms and kata, even standing meditation, you can perceive a difference between someone in tune and connected with their surroundings and someone who is not. Like hitting a heavy bag with the effect of hitting the bag, as opposed to thinking 'I am hitting the bag. Now I hit it again' kinda thing.If you do form work and don't understand that everything you are doing has forces added to it from the outside, you are not really doing anything apart from waving your arms around and not falling over.

"Mindless" bag work is one of the things I constantly get on my students about, particularly the intermediate ones. The beginners I forgive a little bit, because sometimes they're still having trouble just performing the movement.

Even then, though, I remind them that the subtle little details like "keep your hands up", while they seem unimportant when mashing a heavy bag, are really important when the other guy can hit you in the head.

Illustrative Story: One of the guys in our gym got into a routine on the bag where he would walk up to it, pound it with some heavy punches, and then turn 180 degrees, walk away, and repeat. I pointed out that this might be a bad plan. He kept doing it...and kept doing it right through into sparring, where he walked in, threw a few punches, turned around...and was promptly clobbered by his partner.

There's a time to focus on the internals, but yeah, losing sight of the external gets hazardous real fast...

You're one of a few Eskrima practitioners I've seen/heard make reference to live blade play, but I've never understood how that works. Clearly, it's not full-power, full-contact (unless you're regularly murdering your students)...so how do you make it work in a way that preserves the danger without sending people to the hospital?

We don't spar with live blades, that indeed would be super dangerous, but flowing with a certain focus works well - like a mirroring practice for instance. Really you don't have to make it more dangerous than that to preserve the 'feeling'... being in range of someone with a randomly moving, sharp length of steel feels inherently dangerous with nothing added! Not sure why, but it does.

So, you play real slow, and real accurate.

My teacher only really took out the live blades when folks were getting too aggro and sloppy (taking too many hits/not paying attention). He'd get irritated and pull out the real steel. The biggest stress was not wanting to accidentally cut him .... hence the wonderful focusing effect. It's funny really, there was no real worry about getting hit (after all he had immense control and accuracy), but a much greater one about f#*king up. And that in the end is all he wanted - for us to listen to him and notice our mistakes - out of monkey brain into frontal lobe perhaps ...?

I could see how having another human being moving around with a sharp piece of steel near you would produce a certain level of discomfort...

The "don't hurt/upset teacher" thing is interesting. I've noticed a similar effect with a couple of students...they go way to hard with their peers, but as soon as they're matched up with a trainer or pro fighter...the intensity drops, everyone plays nice...

It almost seems like he was straddling a line between monkey brain and frontal lobe.

I actually believe he was trying to overrule monkey altogether and connect straight to lizard.When you played with him, not with live blades as it was too hectic, but with Aluminum or padded weapons, he'd try to corner you, back you up, overwhelm your nervous system in whatever way he could to bring out the fight/flight/curl up into fetal position response, and then start to manage that 'edge'.So live weapons to quash the monkey, practice weapons coupled with his ability, to help build control into the 'edge of the lizard' in crisis - to pull out the focus and fight response together .....